Opposition seeks to ban governors resigning early to force elections

Several opposition MPs have suggested banning the voluntary resignation of governors with subsequent early elections saying that the move, while favoring the incumbents, is too costly to the state budget.

A bill has been prepared by Mikhail Serdyuk of the center-left
party Fair Russia, but it has also received support from all the
parliamentary opposition – the Communist and the Liberal
Democratic Parties.It suggests amendments to several federal acts
that would ban mayors and governors who resign from their posts
to run again for the same posts in the subsequent early
elections.

The objective of the move is to eliminate the current
controversial practice when regional heads voluntarily retire in
order to provoke early elections. The incumbents usually remain
acting heads of regions until the poll and continue to use the
benefits of this position while their opponents have less time to
prepare their campaigns.

“If every governor launches an early election through this
scheme this could increase the cost to the national budge by as
much as 20 percent, and this means millions of roublesor even
hundreds of millions if we talk about the whole country,”
Serdyuk told the mass circulation daily Izvestia.

The politician added that governors often resigned and initiated
early polls immediately after they saw their ratings were
falling. “Such tricks are an injustice to the voters. But one
should not count the chicken before they are hatched. Work till
the end of your term; report on the work of the whole period. If
the plan for the whole five years is fulfilled in just two or
three years this is a success, otherwise such behavior is
completely unjust,” Serdyuk stated.

The lawmaker also noted that the trick used by the governors
could be compared to some of the corruption schemes.

The head of the Communist Party’s legal department, Vadim
Solovyov, told reporters that his comrades fully supported
Serdyuk’s suggestion.

The head of the Center of Political Information think tank
Aleksey Mukhin also said that Serdyuk’s bill had slim chances of
passing as any governor in the country could protest it as
anti-constitutional.

The current governor of the Penza Region, Vasily Bochkaryov
agreed that resignation with a subsequent re-run was a strange
and unjust practice, but noted that it was anti-constitutional to
ban anyone from the polls, especially if heads of regions had
been previously appointed by the president and wanted to confirm
the people’s trust by running alongside competitors.

In 2004 President Putin replaced gubernatorial and mayoral
elections with direct presidential appointments in a bid to bring
more stability to the country’s political system and purge the
corrupt regional elites. Voting was reintroduced during Dmitry
Medvedev's presidency in 2012 in order to promote democracy and
stimulate the development of the Russian political system.

Governors and mayors started using the early retirement trick at
once. For example, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin resigned from his
post in June 2013 but remained acting mayor, registered as a
candidate and won the elections in September with over 50 percent
of the vote.

In 2014 the governors of Orenburg, Tymen, Kursk, Lipetsk,
Vologda, Bashkortostan and Nizhny Novgorod regions submitted
their resignations early in order to take part in the polls that
are due on the nationwide election day on September 14. The
President accepted all the resignations (it happened on Friday
for heads of Nizhny Novgorod and Bashkortostan), but all
officials remain in their posts as acting governors.